On 02/01/2009, at 2:17 PM, Noah Slater wrote:
> I appreciate you're frustrated with the current situation Antony,
> but I think
> it's unfair for you to be claiming any kind of consensus without a
> vote.
That post wasn't meant to be a criticism. Apologies if it felt like it
was.
There isn't a clear consensus in this thread, which to my mind
reflects the fact that there are trade-offs that don't have objective
evaluation measures.
I fully support the idea that a product should reflect the vision and
opinion of a very small group. Abstracting from my preference for a
more robustly theoretical approach to API desig, the holistically best
result is likely to arise from this model. So I don't e.g. mean
'gatekeeper' in a negative way.
> I would
> be interested in seeing a patch, explanation, and vote. I've already
> expressed
> my agreement with many of the points you've raised, and I'm not the
> only one.
I was only referring to a lack of expressed support for a fully
reflexive model.
It's never been clear to me that there is a process for voting - the
decision making process within the commit group seems opaque.
> It's pretty pointless for us to keep sending emails over proposed
> changes to the
> code without actually seeing the changes.
I think a change to the API could be decided without reference to the
code implementing that change. In fact, IMO the API *should* be
considered separately from the code implementing that change.
Otherwise APIs will tend to be decided not on the basis of design, but
on the amount of effort some person is prepared to spend to
demonstrate it, and hence code inertia, often resulting in expedient
solutions. This means that good, but expensive ideas, can be lost.
The models under discussion have evolved from simple name identity by
using '_id' and '_rev' everywhere, to a '_meta' wrapper, to Geir's
fully reflexive model.
So I'd prefer to get buy-in to a model or principles, at which point
anyone could implement it. That's what I tried to do with the change
to the FS layout to support i18n, the committable implementation of
which is my focus right now.
Antony Blakey
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